Discussion paper for a highly parallel array processor-based machine

The architectural plant for a quickly realizable implementation of a highly parallel special-purpose computer system with peak performance in the range of 6 billion floating point operations per second is discussed. The architecture is suitable to Lattice Gauge theoretical computations of fundamental physics interest and may be applicable to a range of other problems which deal with numerically intensive computational problems. The plan is quickly realizable because it employs a maximum of commercially available hardware subsystems and because the architecture is software-transparent to the individual processors, allowing straightforward re-use of whatever commercially available operating-systems and support software that is suitable to run on the commercially-produced processors. A tiny prototype instrument, designed along this architecture has already operated. A few elementary examples of programs which can run efficiently are presented. The large machine which the authors would propose to build would be based upon a highly competent array-processor, the ST-100 Array Processor, and specific design possibilities are discussed. The first step toward realizing this plan practically is to install a single ST-100 to allow algorithm development to proceed while a demonstration unit is built using two of the ST-100 Array Processors